The Rise and Rise of Creativity
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For example: Like Miles Davis playing both cool jazz and jazz fusion. Cubism, paint on a flat surface all sides of a 3D object.
Most people either do one or the other, thinking that just doing new things is enough to create something new but lacking the stamina to stick to it, or blindly follow the rules of an old tradition that has lost its relevance.
A good artist actually know this theory and will seek to apply it. But I think its also where modern jazz and art lost its way, just as the corporates, is that they are to buzzy being creative todo the actual work of creating.
Free thinkers are contrarians for most of their lives because they are not swayed by the undulating rhetoric of the times. When society is sane, free thinkers appear sane, then society is insane, free thinkers appear insane (when in a group of insane people, those who are sane will be labeled as insane).
Free thinkers are always sane with reference to the reality of the world around them but they can become unhinged from social and cultural norms when these norms start to diverge from observable reality.
I think this point is summarized well by the blurb of a book i came across recently:
“Everything you have been told about creativity is wrong
From line managers, corporate CEOs, urban designers, teachers, politicians, mayors, advertisers and even our friends and family, the message is “be creative’. Creativity is heralded as the driving force of our contemporary society, celebrated as agile, progressive and liberating. It is the spring of the knowledge economy and shapes the cities we inhabit. It even defines our politics. What could possibly be wrong with this?
In this brilliant, counter-intuitive blast, Oli Mould demands that we rethink the story we are being sold. Behind the novelty, he shows that creativity is a barely hidden form of neoliberal appropriation. It is a regime that prioritises individual success over collective flourishing. It refuses to recognise anything—job, place, person—that is not profitable. And it impacts on everything around us: the places where we work, the way we are managed, how we spend our leisure time.
Is there an alternative? Mould offers a radical redefinition of creativity, one embedded in the idea of collective flourishing, outside the tyranny of profit. Bold, passionate and refreshing, Against Creativity, is a timely correction to the doctrine of our times.”
nice framing. All hail the algorithm!
Amen! "Shut up and go with the flow" is common advice I hear when I question the logic of various decisions in multiple organizations. If a corporation really wants creativity, they'll allow and REWARD asking "pesky questions" that may hurt egos of those with higher rank.
Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends & Influence People" basically confirms this: you have to have a personal relationship to truly influence somebody, logic alone won't cut it. I hate that book, but it's speaks the ugly truth. Humans are not Vulcans.
It's there if you want it, most orgs don't. I'm just the messenger.
That being said, some contrarians gum up the works with low-quality questions and research. (Sometimes called "trolls".) There does need to be a systematic way to ask questions and make suggestions with a vetting process, but such requires a skill-set and training, which does require org resources and time.
Can we say creative people are more attracted to, and produce more surprising information than non-creative people?
Corporations are usually biased towards logic and statistics (finance & accounting), but through this they can become blind to the fact that predictable bits contain much less information than unpredictable bits, and they can even develop a kind of hidden disgust around creativity.
For example, nobody gets fired for being "logical" and it not working out. But if you're make a creative mistake, well that's all on you and you're shown the door. This compounds and all you're left with are "Experts" in logic straightjackets.
I would argue they're more biased towards metrics than logic.
So creativity exists, it is well and flourishing, but still the overwhelming majority of people are not creative. Therefore, most people at Facebook, Google etc. are not creative. If you want to be creative, you need to be creative in carving out your own way of doing so also. It was always like that, and it will always be like that.
I understand where you are coming from, and it might indeed appear that way. But the primary reason they are successful and have been able to make this step is because of the rich inheritance available to the researchers.
Most jobs under Capitalism today are soul crushing and exploitative. In my journey of going upstream to try to seek to understand the root of this dysfunction, I came to see that it is due to 1) the Intellectual Property system that creates contrived/artificial scarcity due to outdated economics, and 2) the credit monopoly [the way we are forced to mediate our interactions through capitalist debt protocols/agreements ($, €, etc)]. Our current system is truly the elephant in the room. [1]
I really don't think an Intellectual Property Monopoly is the only way creativity can happen. I think if we switched to FLOSS-everything we'd still have all the same tech. In fact I think we'd have more innovation than ever before. More chances for more people to work on things means more experimentation and results, could mean safer and more sustainable developments - and thus more sustainable technologies.
Silicon Valley isn't special. I am on here with you other technology enthusiasts and experts because the discussions on innovation do happen here currently. But it's not because it's unique. It's because Silicon Valley and American investors exert power over everyone else in the world through through it's IP system and agreements like TRIPS, together with the US-based money system and US-influenced 'development' organizations like the IMF and the World Bank. [2]
Imagine what the world would look like without IP?
[1] https://prezi.com/xmzld_-wayho/new-economy-new-wealth/
[2] https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/10/16/apartheid-in-the...
And where did that come from? From some open-source foundation?
From our dead ancestors.
“A patent is a device that enables one man to claim special financial rewards for being the last link in the complicated social process that produced the invention.”
— Lewis Mumford
"Every machine has had the same history — a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.
Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle-all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.
By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say — This is mine, not yours?"
— Peter Kropotkin
We are all standing on the shoulders of giants.
I'd disagree with that. Take the average programmer at Google who went to work this morning and wrote a hundred lines of code that didn't already exist. They created something that didn't exist before so must be a creative individual.
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x = 0For the example above, one could look at it as a meaningless blob, and someone else could describe it as a run-time behavior with y-axis representing time. Someone else could have some other interpretation. So a narrative could help it fit it in the intended place
Over the course of 400 years, creativity and freedoms of expression has indeed been on the rise.
However, companies and human organisation still have the same needs to funnel the creative input, hopefully into something valuable with minimal externalized costs.
So the balance is between personal creative freedoms and benefits, versus organisational control, exploitation and value extraction.
Why? You seem to have some limited definition of creativity.
If you want to be truly free thinking then suffer your whole life for your art/creation and die in obscurity only to be celebrated decades after your death.
Contrarian is used as if it means; I can do what I want against a percieved opponent and get paid handsomely for it.
The real contrarians are pushing data collection, adtech, outrage machines and using knowledge to control people. The power in being contrary is found in collective outrage movements, tech and religion instead.
Thinkingly freely is part of the order now, as reliable and necessary as bread and butter. It is not contrary.
News to Andy Warhol I'm sure, who lived until 1987.
Being rebellious and contrary ended with his workman-like style and using commercial subjects to cash in on pop art. The desire to create paintings that have a revolutionary and contrary meaning to the establishment, has since faded away. We are seeing the fresh new ideas in video games instead and they were made to be saleable and agreeable products from day one. Its very difficult to get people to see a video game that truly challenges the status quo.
We are yet to see a peice of art or media that really challenges the world, since the 60s.
All the power is in the online platforms and data, that are used to target people with ourageous ideas. Art production has turned into a normal everyday machine, like the dishwasher or hot pockets.
That being said, how do you define "challenges world"? Because I am pretty sure I can find challenging pieces made after 1960 regardless of what your definition of challenging is. They are just not mainstream.
Now anything that breaks the trend is drowned out with money and/or censorship.
The banana taped to the wall a few years ago inspired people to think about how much art costs to buy, and how art is a money-laundering front for rich people. There was little discussion and sight of the original intent of the piece as a humorous comedy. It did not change how people view society, the world or art. It is seen as a clever man who could sell a $2 banana for $120k, rather than a comment on what art means. The piece has been captured by neoliberal economics (as if it ever meant to be anything else).
The video game Hatred [0] was a misanthrophic mass killer who goes on a genocidal crusade. It was banned from steam and panned by reviews. I don't endorse the content of the game, though it perfectly demonstrates the stifling lack of power any particular piece of art has to change people's minds today. You have to be approved by the internet's gatekeepers to be seen and heard. The act of creation has to be matched with the audience interacting with your artwork and a single image of your game does not have the same impact as a Dada artwork did in the 1900s.
>And people play them for completely different reasons then "being rebellious"
I agree (partly). The advent garde is dead, the power is with the tech platforms to change society, not art. So there are no "free thinking creatives", there are just technologists who push internet platforms further and further into people's lives. That's where the "free thought" is. Art is entirely ordered and almost completely chaos-free.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatred_(video_game)
A minor rebuttal, people do like the rebellious aspect of Star Wars, despite it's conformity to everyday art production.
And it is completely odd to have "change the world" expectations on art form that has very specific demographic as an interest, is super time consuming to interact with and have tendency to create own world isolated from the rest of world.
In any case, it sounds to me that what you want is the major power institution using art to make change to society from top down rather then individual artists experimenting and rebelling.
The Hatred example was to show the power of the gatekeepers. I dont really have a better example of oppositional art lately, which adds to the idea that its gone. Maybe SUPERHOT's 'obey' motif may qualify barely.
I don't want any of that stuff, per se. I'm just saying its gone.
I dont understand how you came to the conclusion that I want institutional power over society, when the advant garde was exactly against that. The institute had power and it was sucessfully rebelled aginst. No longer.
If you want a better recitation of art history look up Camille Paglia. Its more provoking and better explained over a lecture than trying to jam it into a comment.
Hatred was available to buy, even as it was not on steam. Steam is not like apple store - you can sideload windows apps. It does not even show warning like alternative to playstore would. And the bad reviews did not made it impossible to get. The controversy around it likely just added to sales.
Hatred shows only that some games don't make it to the steam. Steam was always historically super selective in what they allow. Quite openly so. The steam community was historically even more selective making it hard for new genres to go in at first.
> I dont understand how you came to the conclusion that I want institutional power over society, when the advant garde was exactly against that
I misread what you wrote.
The second issue is that there are individual artists experimenting and counter-cultures but the current "economics of creativity" mean these are almost immediately stolen, distorted and released for mass appeal.
Before that, we had Artist's Shit [1] in 1961 and countless similar stunts. I'm under impression that the main thing art does today is rebel and "force to reflect". Perhaps that's why almost no one is interested in it, as what it has to say is usualy quite shallow in its message (capitalism sucks, we get it) and also not very linked to the actual piece (The pieces often require lengthy explanation on what the artist was actually trying to say).
I don't care that no-one was interested or not, the key part is that the content of the discussion centred around money.
If people weren't interested in the subject of artistic comdy and they expressed that, there would be evidence art still matters. Wrapping up people's disinterest with a conversation around money, shows it's dead art. Shallow or deep, interpreted or not.
The fact that you guys are still deflecting from the idea that art is less potent, is in itself a sorrowful confirmation of the idea.
I think we've seen so much challenging since the 1950s that perhaps everything that could be challenged was already challenged to death by multiple artists and there's nothing else left to challenge.
> “The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. [...] write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don’t show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward.”
That's creativity to me. In these months I've been exploring what I can make in Blender, mostly weird stuff, posting it nowhere. Nothing has been more satisfying.
Most "creation" in the past involved transforming matter. No one ever "created" matter (well, except God in their intellectual universe).
It may be accurate to say that intellectual activity can be creative (though it's undoubtedly derivative most of the time), but in the physical world, creation is most likely to be an inaccurate term.
But there's no inherent reason why it should tricke down in income terms.
But people are down on corporations for good reason. They're a poorly-regulated entitlement.